Why would anyone risk so much over a senator’s expenses?

The Mike Duffy affair

I bought a newspaper this morning. The lady at the counter asked if I wanted a receipt. I said no, but it occurred to me: there must be people who expense these things. That’s why she asked. A newspaper!

The kind of people who think it fit to claim a newspaper, or a stick of gum, or a cup of coffee on their expenses are not crooks. They are playing by the rules. But that is all they are guided by. Not modesty, or proportion, or common sense, or the simple recognition that it’s not their money, but strictly what the rules allow.

And, I suppose, a sense that they are entitled to pocket absolutely everything they can within that limit. The money is sitting there, after all. What are they supposed to do: not take it?

That, essentially, was the moral logic underpinning Mike Duffy’s stirring speech to the Senate on Tuesday. There was nothing in the rules that specifically forbade him from claiming thousands of dollars in housing expenses he did not in fact incur. There was nothing in the rules that said you could not claim as your “primary residence” a house you did not in fact live in. So he did.

And then — infamy! — the prime minister made him pay it back. Whatever other charges he may have laid, it was clear that this was his major grievance. The rules said he could take the money (well, they didn’t say he couldn’t) so it was dirty pool for the prime minister to insist he give it back, on the basis of mere propriety. Worse, he claimed, the prime minister threatened to strip him of his Senate appointment if he did not.

Except, of course, he didn’t have to pay it back, as we know: Nigel Wright paid it for him. And he wasn’t stripped of his Senate seat, or any of its benefits — not until this week’s move to suspend him, along with senators Pamela Wallin and Patrick Brazeau, without pay. But by making that the thrust of his accusation, he gave the prime minister his opening. Wednesday, he took it.

Stephen Harper has not had such a good question period in some time. In contrast to Tuesday’s feeble attempts to change the subject, Wednesday he was combative, focused, on his game. Unusually, he took all of the questions directed his way, rather than fob them off on his parliamentary secretary. More unusually still, he answered some of them — the closest he has come to explaining himself since the whole affair began.

Some, but not all: NDP Leader Tom Mulcair had another good outing probing some of the juicier recent leads — sample question: who were the 13 senior Conservatives who (CTV reports) knew of the Wright payment? — to much of the usual prime ministerial dodging. But whenever the subject turned to Sen. Duffy’s complaints, Harper was direct and unequivocal. “You’re darn right I told him he should repay his expenses,” he roared.

That perhaps suggests Sen. Duffy’s speech was not quite the “bombshell” it was made out to be. The conventional wisdom is that Duffy so wounded the prime minister that he had to respond. I think it provided him with an opportunity: to frame the whole issue as Ethical Prime Minister Versus Entitled Senators. But it is not about that, any more than it is about Boys In Short Pants Telling Senators What To Do.

We have to distinguish between the dramatic and the germane. Sen. Duffy’s speech was a compelling, if pathetic, human spectacle. It did not get at the nub of the expenses scandal. He and the other senators make a good case in terms of due process — that they should not be suspended without a fair hearing. They are on weaker ground in portraying themselves as blameless victims. The pay and perks they stand to lose are not things to which they are entitled, but only accustomed. That which the prime minister giveth, the prime minister can taketh away.

That the prime minister’s people play rough is not quite a revelation. Politics is a nasty business filled with nasty people: It’s the Sopranos without guns. The issue is not, then, the prime minister’s insistence that Duffy repay his expenses, or any threats that may have accompanied it, but everything that came afterward: not only the secret payment, but the campaign of deceit that followed, involving not only the prime minister’s chief of staff, but several others in his office, and a number of prominent senators to boot — the stonewalling of the auditors, the doctoring of the Senate committee’s report, and on and on.

At the heart of it remains Wright’s mysterious decision to cut Duffy a cheque from his personal account: still unexplained, still inexplicable, and not only because of its apparent illegality. (I do not believe Duffy’s story that he had to be threatened into taking the money: let’s just say it would be out of character.) Leave aside ethics, or law. It makes no sense even as matter of pure expedience. Why risk so much for so seemingly little?

Whether the prime minister knew about it is frankly secondary. On this, the prime minister has been unequivocal from the start; again, I suspect he is content for this to be the focus. While it would surely be fatal if he were found to have lied about this, it remains a scandal even if he didn’t. Somehow a number of people around the prime minister absorbed the idea that it was okay to break the law to make an embarrassing political problem go away. That’s deeply troubling, whatever he told them, or they him.

It’s the why, more than the who, that raises the most disturbing questions. Why on earth would they go to such trouble over a senator’s expenses? To paraphrase A Man For All Seasons, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world . . . but for Duffy?

A National Post original, Andrew Coyne's journalism career has also included positions with Maclean's, the Globe and Mail and the Southam newspaper chain. In addition, he has contributed to a wide range... read more of other publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, National Review, Time and Saturday Night. Coyne is also a long-time member of the CBC’s popular At Issue panel on The National.View author's profile